In a season of political turmoil, my students today are curious about 1968. I have to tell them it was very serious business.

It was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve looked over and seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you…But we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land,” which he defined as a time and place where and when content of character was valued over color of skin. The year 1968 was raised black fists at the Olympics and burning inner cities. It brought a deluge of Agent Orange on Vietnamese jungles and “monster babies.”

It was watching my mailbox for a dreaded letter from the Port Angeles, Washington, Selective Service that never came. Mine didn’t, but others did, and some of their bodies came home in bags.

1968 was very serious business., visceral, raw, personal, and sometimes deadly. It was an anxious time at the cusp of adulthood. I consoled myself on winter days by watching a skirt of snow crawl down the Olympic slopes toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

I want to take a time machine back to 1968 — 50 years ago — and try to explain our time to my high-school class. I want to watch their jaws drop. I want to take my smart phone, although it wouldn’t work (no cell towers then), and explain my instant access to a world of information, as well as its use by a barely literate president of the United States to spread lies to millions of followers. Technology has not done much for our political gray matter. Imagine a president crazier than Richard Nixon! What would Nixon have done with Twitter?

My classmates might remind me that loathsome presidents are not new, and neither are wars: Richard Nixon won in 1968 (barely), and then with 49 states (all but Massachusetts) in 1972, before Watergate toppled him. And who won the Vietnam war, anyway? Ho Chi Minh ran the United States out, but today they have named the Hanoi stock market for him. My last pair of Nikes were made in Vietnam. I get emails advertising timeshares on the beach at Da Nang. Tell that to my classmate from the Class of 1968 who came back from the battle at Da Nang in a body bag, having fought communism. I will not get to see his jaw drop.

And, hey, 1968, I want to tell you about Amazon.com, and Google, legal weed, and professional football players with hair halfway down their backs.

We could play “Eve of Destruction” on our stereos and remind each other that some things do not change: Race (“Hate your next door neighbor and don’t forget to say grace”). We have ISIS; they had wars in the Middle East: “Even the Jordan River has bodies floating.” Indeed. Nuclear destruction, yes, but a tinhorn dictator with a hydrogen bomb might take some explaining. However, the ambience — and the fear — is very familiar, even if the enemy then was the relatively sane, if communist, Soviet Union: “If the button is pushed, there’s no running away. There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave.”

Race is a constant. Having just witnessed Selma and the assassination of Dr. King, my classmates would find accounts of Ferguson, Charlottesville, et al. very familiar, even after I told him that the United States had elected an erudite black president — followed by the barely literate real-estate mogul who has trouble disowning the Ku Klux Klan.

I want to describe a stock market in which the biggest enterprises did not exist in 1968 — Amazon.com had not yet been started by two young men in a Seattle garage, nor Google, Netflix, or Microsoft, all fruits of a digital revolution that in 1968 had barely broached science fiction. Sears is dying, and The Greatest Show on Earth has vanished. The elephants have been retired, as an act of kindness in a world suffering the cruelties of ISIS, and still searching for mercy.

Bruce E. Johansen is Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.